How the Country House became English: a review

 

Stephanie Barczewski, How the Country House became English (Reaktion, 2023)

 

This book is a companion to the author’s previous work, a study of the connections between country houses and the British Empire. That book posited that ‘over 1,500 houses were funded by imperial profits’, although it also proposed that, at most, 16 per cent of country houses were built by owners with direct links to imperial sources of wealth. Many more houses, however, contained collections that were imported from British colonies, or reflected imperial influence in other ways. Why then, asks Barczewski, did so few houses feature ‘even a hint of an architectural style imported from one of Britain’s colonies’? The question leads Barczewski to re-examine the history of country houses from the perspective of the complexities of the British nation state, formed over the four hundred years that form the principal period under consideration in the book.

 

The country house as a cultural form, Barczewski concludes, is less a British invention than a particularly English construct, which happens also to be manifested, in different ways, in Wales and Scotland.  The book seeks to reassert the Englishness of the country house, while always emphasizing the complexities and contradictions implicit within such a proposition. The argument unfolds over a series of themed chapters. Early chapters look at the way so many houses in England had violent origins, as domestic architecture formed from the shells left at the Dissolution of the Monasteries. A further spate of violence was seen in the Civil Wars of the mid-17^th century, during which numerous houses were besieged, ransacked, and sometimes razed to the ground. One of the underlying themes of English house building, however, was a desire, over time, to erase signs of the turbulence and disorder from which these houses. Similarly, landed families could sometimes successfully disguise allegiances previously held during the religious divides of the 17^th century, or find that ‘gothic’ architecture previously associated with catholic cultural expression was back in fashion as a manifestation of ‘English’ cultural affiliation and hegemony.

 

One of the striking arguments made by the book, the focus of the fourth chapter, is that the ‘British’ country house is a cultural mirage. There was never a British tradition of house building. Rather, country house architecture developed on distinct, though occasionally overlapping, lines in England, Wales, and Scotland. There is little to connect the baronial houses of Scotland, Barczewski contends, with country houses in lowland England. Their development followed distinct trajectories, such that the notion of a ‘British Country House’ is simply a geographical shorthand rather than an aesthetic category. Meanwhile, distinctly ‘English’ architecture went through successive evolutions in the 18^th and 19^th centuries: Palladianism, Baroque, Neoclassical, and Gothic Revival, before settling in the early 20^th century into a comfortable (and comforting) vernacular revival. The more solidly ‘English’ houses became, the more they erased any sense of the imperial roots that some of them, undoubtedly, had.

 

But architectural styles had ceased to evolve by the early 20^th century. “The international modern style made little impression in England, and the few new houses that were built after 1920 were generally small in scale.” Thereafter, the country house ceased to have any credence as a cultural form, becoming instead captured by the proponents of heritage nostalgia, including the National Trust. This nostalgia has proved profitable for some – Highclere Castle has gone from “a cash-hemorrhaging white elephant to a cash-register-ringing profit machine” – but the nostalgic view of the country house has limits, as recent controversies over the National Trust’s attempts to expose the colonial and imperial connections of some of its properties have shown.

 

Barczewski has developed a complex and interesting argument, drawing on a great sweep of mostly secondary literature. She creates maps and graphs that demonstrate the spread of particular country house fashions over time, and uses the temporal and geographical distributions that they create to weave a nuanced and multi-layered narrative. The book is very well written, and will be much pored over for years to come. It is an important addition to country house studies. 

 

I can see two potential flaws in the book, however. First, the idea of a ‘British Country House’, which Barczewski takes so much to task, is arguably something of a straw-man. Britain is a complex place, where no-one takes seriously the idea that a country house nestled deep in the South Downs, say, has anything much to do with a baronial castle in the Scottish Highlands, beyond both being domestic residences of larger-than-average-size. It perhaps takes a North American author to spend an entire book to tell us that England, Scotland, and Wales are distinct territories, even while they come together to form one, if not two, collective (and contested) identities (Britain, and the United Kingdom). However, Barczewski is absolutely right to shine a spotlight on England, as the part of the UK that remains serially under-investigated.

 

Second, the book’s analysis largely comes to an end in the 1920s. There is no room here for a reference to John Martin Robinson’s The Latest Country Houses (1984), written in response to endless publications in the 1970s and 1980s announcing the end of the country house. Robinson argued that, in fact, new country houses have continued to be built in new and innovative styles. Barczewski, however, doesn't really take this into account. She seems to think that every privately owned house represents either “old money” or the object of desire for “rock stars, corporate CEOs and footballers” (p304). As a result the country house is ‘frozen in amber’ as a cultural form: “a part of the nation’s past but no longer of its present.”

 

There is very little attempt by Barczewski to examine any more deeply the reality of country house ownership in Britain in 2023. There is no reference to Historic Houses in the index, an organisation representing over 1,400 country houses across the UK. To my knowledge, none of the 1,400+ owners of these houses is a footballer or a rock star. A proportion of them are indeed ‘old money’, sometimes they are families who have lived in the same house for more than eight hundred years. Others have had less length of tenure, perhaps a hundred or a hundred and fifty years, perhaps not as much as this. A small proportion are indeed ‘new money’, who have used fortunes made in business to buy and restore historic properties, injecting them with much needed new capital. In such ways, the English country house sustains itself, and continues to do so, as it has throughout history. Just 300 of the 1,400 properties are open to day visitors. The majority make their money in other ways: events, hospitality, weddings, concerts, accommodation. There are more than 1,400 different strategies in fact: every house is unique. But Barczewski tars them all with pretty much the same brush: they are today, largely, nostalgic embarrassments, destined never to live up to the glory days of when they were first built, back when Britain (or was it England?) ruled the waves.